Audacity Forum

I just recorded a podcast 1 hour and 23 minutes long. After finishing the recording, the entire recording was blank up to about the 1 hour 9 minute mark. So only the last 14 minutes were saved. I have no idea how this happened. Does anyone know how this could have happened? Or by any chance could there be some archive that I could recover?

Thanks.

That will happen if you run out of disk space. How much free space do you have?

I've got 38 gb left on my hard drive, which I believe is 300 gb. When I record, it says I have something like 30 hours of disk space left.

There's quite a few other possibilities but we'll need some specific information.

What is the full and exact version of Audacity that you are using (look in the "Help menu > About Audacity" where it should say something like: "Audacity ® 1.3.14-alpha-Sep 15 2011 (Unicode)" )

What were the exact steps: (did you record the entire podcast in one go? could you see the waveform appearing in the Audacity track while it was recording? Was it when you pressed Stop and zoomed out that you saw there was missing audio?)

Is this a clean install of Audacity or have you customised any of the settings in "Preferences"?
Have you had any previous version of Audacity installed on this machine?

I will have to check when I am back home for the exact version. I'm pretty sure it's the latest Beta for OS X. I'm using Snow Leopard.

The recording was 1 hour 23 minutes. The only thing I did was to pause the recording once and then re-start. This was at about the 45-50 min. mark to my recollection. The waveform was appearing, as normal, the whole time. When we finished recording, I hit the stop button and then the left directional arrow to return to the beginning of the recording, and it showed as blank. I then scrolled forward, and data appeared at roughly the 1:09:00. So the last 14 minutes or so were there, but everything before that was gone.

I have not customized any of the preferences. I have had previous versions but I'm pretty sure I've been using this one for the past several months. I have recorded over 100 podcasts, ranging in length from about 20 minutes to 2 hours, and have never had this happen before.

willsband wrote: The only thing I did was to pause the recording once and then re-start. This was at about the 45-50 min. mark to my recollection.

Could it have been at about 69 minutes?

steve wrote:

willsband wrote: The only thing I did was to pause the recording once and then re-start. This was at about the 45-50 min. mark to my recollection.

Could it have been at about 69 minutes?

Good question, but no. I remembered what the discussion was when we re-started the recording and that's not where the cutoff was.

Have a look in:
Edit > Preferences > Directories

What settings do you have in there?

Just stopped at home and have the following additional info:

Audacity version: 1.3.13-beta (Unicode)
In Audacity > Preferences > Directories, the location of the temporary files directory is

/var/folders/-v/-v+FcVUeHwCDXf-mN3S4A++++TI/-Tmp-/audacity-scott

The box for play and/or record using RAM is not checked, and the Minimum Free Memory (MB) is set at 16.

Thanks.

willsband wrote:In Audacity > Preferences > Directories, the location of the temporary files directory is

/var/folders/-v/-v+FcVUeHwCDXf-mN3S4A++++TI/-Tmp-/audacity-scott

I'm not a Mac user, but to me that looks really weird.
I've asked for a second opinion about this.